Tag: quantum physics

For 90 years physicists have known that incompatibly opposite properties are inherent in all elementary particles. Now Rochester researchers say they’ve resolved this weird and inescapable wave-particle duality.

Optical physics and quantum optics will have a profound effect on our daily lives in the decades to come, and two Rochester faculty are among the authors of a new survey of the biggest scientific challenges and questions in the field.

For more than 30 years, researchers have been creating quantum dots – nanoscale semiconductors with remarkable properties. But quantum dot synthesis has occurred largely by trial and error. Thanks to the work of two Rochester chemists, that may be about to change.

Using the strange rules of quantum mechanics, researchers were able to put a quantum bit in a superposition of two different energy states at the same time in order to speed up the accurate measurement of frequencies.

Researchers have developed a “quantum enigma machine” to improve on data encryption. The device manipulates photons to create an unbreakable encrypted message with a key that’s far shorter than the message—the first time that has ever been done.

Physicists have uncovered a hidden connection between a famous 350-year-old mathematical formula for pi, everyone’s favourite irrational number, and quantum mechanics. At least one mathematician has pronounced the discovery “a cunning piece of magic.”

The best guide to the boundary between our everyday world and the “spooky” features of the quantum world has been a theorem called Bell’s Inequality, but now a new paper shows that we understand the frontiers of that quantum world less well than scientists have thought.

In the new paper, published in the July 20 edition of Optica, University of Rochester researchers show that a classical beam of light that would be expected to obey Bell’s Inequality can fail this test in the lab, if the beam is properly prepared to have a particular feature: entanglement.